Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade (Romanian: [ˈmirt͡ʃe̯a eliˈade]; March 9, 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and sky, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.

Work

The general nature of religion
In his work on the history of religion, Eliade is most highly regarded for his writings on Alchemy, Shamanism, Yoga and what he called the eternal return—the implicit belief, supposedly present in religious thought in general, that religious behavior is not only an imitation of, but also a participation in, sacred events, and thus restores the mythical time of origins. Eliade’s thinking was in part influenced by Rudolf Otto, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Nae Ionescu and the writings of the Traditionalist School (René Guénon and Julius Evola). For instance, Eliade’s ‘The Sacred and the Profane’ partially builds on Otto’s The Idea of the Holy to show how religion emerges from the experience of the sacred, and myths of time and nature.

Eliade is noted for his attempt to find broad, cross-cultural parallels and unities in religion, particularly in myths. Wendy Doniger, Eliade’s colleague from 1978 until his death, notes that “Eliade argued boldly for universals where he might more safely have argued for widely prevalent patterns”. His Treatise on the History of Religions was praised by French philologist Georges Dumézil for its coherence and ability to synthesize diverse and distinct mythologies.

Robert Ellwood describes Eliade’s approach to religion as follows.

Eliade approaches religion by imagining an ideally “religious” person, whom he calls homo religiosus in his writings. Eliade’s theories basically describe how this homo religiosus would view the world. This does not mean that all religious practitioners actually think and act like homo religiosus. Instead, it means that religious behavior “says through its own language” that the world is as homo religiosus would see it, whether or not the real-life participants in religious behavior are aware of it.

Sacred and profane
Eliade argues that religious thought in general rests on a sharp distinction between the Sacred and the profane; whether it takes the form of God, gods, or mythical Ancestors, the Sacred contains all “reality”, or value, and other things acquire “reality” only to the extent that they participate in the sacred.

Eliade’s understanding of religion centers on his concept of hierophany (manifestation of the Sacred)—a concept that includes, but is not limited to, the older and more restrictive concept of theophany (manifestation of a god). From the perspective of religious thought, Eliade argues, hierophanies give structure and orientation to the world, establishing a sacred order. The “profane” space of nonreligious experience can only be divided up geometrically: it has no “qualitative differentiation and, hence, no orientation [is] given by virtue of its inherent structure”. Thus, profane space gives man no pattern for his behavior. In contrast to profane space, the site of a hierophany has a sacred structure to which religious man conforms himself. A hierophany amounts to a “revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the non-reality of the vast surrounding expanse”. As an example of “sacred space” demanding a certain response from man, Eliade gives the story of Moses halting before Yahweh’s manifestation as a burning bush (Exodus 3:5) and taking off his shoes.

Origin myths and sacred time
Eliade notes that, in traditional societies, myth represents the absolute truth about primordial time. According to the myths, this was the time when the Sacred first appeared, establishing the world’s structure—myths claim to describe the primordial events that made society and the natural world be that which they are. Eliade argues that all myths are, in that sense, origin myths: “myth, then, is always an account of a creation”.

Many traditional societies believe that the power of a thing lies in its origin. If origin is equivalent to power, then “it is the first manifestation of a thing that is significant and valid” (a thing’s reality and value therefore lies only in its first appearance).

According to Eliade’s theory, only the Sacred has value, only a thing’s first appearance has value and, therefore, only the Sacred’s first appearance has value. Myth describes the Sacred’s first appearance; therefore, the mythical age is sacred time, the only time of value: “primitive man was interested only in the beginnings […] to him it mattered little what had happened to himself, or to others like him, in more or less distant times”. Eliade postulated this as the reason for the “nostalgia for origins” that appears in many religions, the desire to return to a primordial Paradise.

Eternal return and “Terror of history”
Eliade argues that traditional man attributes no value to the linear march of historical events: only the events of the mythical age have value. To give his own life value, traditional man performs myths and rituals. Because the Sacred’s essence lies only in the mythical age, only in the Sacred’s first appearance, any later appearance is actually the first appearance; by recounting or re-enacting mythical events, myths and rituals “re-actualize” those events. Eliade often uses the term “archetypes” to refer to the mythical models established by the Sacred, although Eliade’s use of the term should be distinguished from the use of the term in Jungian psychology.

Thus, argues Eliade, religious behavior does not only commemorate, but also participates in, sacred events:

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythical hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.”

Eliade called this concept the “eternal return”. Wendy Doniger noted that Eliade’s theory of the eternal return “has become a truism in the study of religions”.

Eliade attributes the well-known “cyclic” vision of time in ancient thought to belief in the eternal return. For instance, the New Year ceremonies among the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, and other Near Eastern peoples re-enacted their cosmogonic myths. Therefore, by the logic of the eternal return, each New Year ceremony was the beginning of the world for these peoples. According to Eliade, these peoples felt a need to return to the Beginning at regular intervals, turning time into a circle.

Eliade argues that yearning to remain in the mythical age causes a “terror of history”: traditional man desires to escape the linear succession of events (which, Eliade indicated, he viewed as empty of any inherent value or sacrality). Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of linear, historical time, with its “terror”, is one of the reasons for modern man’s anxieties. Traditional societies escape this anxiety to an extent, as they refuse to completely acknowledge historical time.

Coincidentia oppositorum
Eliade claims that many myths, rituals, and mystical experiences involve a “coincidence of opposites”, or coincidentia oppositorum. In fact, he calls the coincidentia oppositorum “the mythical pattern”. Many myths, Eliade notes, “present us with a twofold revelation”:

They express on the one hand the diametrical opposition of two divine figures sprung from one and the same principle and destined, in many versions, to be reconciled at some illud tempus of eschatology, and on the other, the coincidentia oppositorum in the very nature of the divinity, which shows itself, by turns or even simultaneously, benevolent and terrible, creative and destructive, solar and serpentine, and so on (in other words, actual and potential).

Eliade argues that “Yahweh is both kind and wrathful; the God of the Christian mystics and theologians is terrible and gentle at once”. He also thought that the Indian and Chinese mystic tried to attain “a state of perfect indifference and neutrality” that resulted in a coincidence of opposites in which “pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, cold and heat […] are expunged from his awareness”.

According to Eliade, the coincidentia oppositorum’s appeal lies in “man’s deep dissatisfaction with his actual situation, with what is called the human condition”. In many mythologies, the end of the mythical age involves a “fall”, a fundamental “ontological change in the structure of the World”. Because the coincidentia oppositorum is a contradiction, it represents a denial of the world’s current logical structure, a reversal of the “fall”.

Also, traditional man’s dissatisfaction with the post-mythical age expresses itself as a feeling of being “torn and separate”. In many mythologies, the lost mythical age was a Paradise, “a paradoxical state in which the contraries exist side by side without conflict, and the multiplications form aspects of a mysterious Unity”. The coincidentia oppositorum expresses a wish to recover the lost unity of the mythical Paradise, for it presents a reconciliation of opposites and the unification of diversity:

On the level of pre-systematic thought, the mystery of totality embodies man’s endeavor to reach a perspective in which the contraries are abolished, the Spirit of Evil reveals itself as a stimulant of Good, and Demons appear as the night aspect of the Gods.